Scanlan: The Neverending Hockey League season takes its toll

We are days away from the NHL Awards and the entry draft, which is days removed from team development camps, which is really the start of next season. On Wednesday, the Senators announced their eight-game 2015-16 pre-season schedule. We begin anew.

So, congratulations NHL. You are officially a 12-month league. Which helps explain, in part, why Sportsnet took a swift kick in the ratings. According to Numeris research, total playoff numbers fell by 20 per cent compared to a year ago. Audiences for the Stanley Cup final series between the Chicago Blackhawks and Tampa Bay Lightning were down 12 per cent compared to the higher-profile L.A. Kings-New York Rangers series in 2014.

This would all fit into a nice little pattern of decline, except for this: television ratings for the first playoff round were UP 36 per cent from a year previous.

(You remember the first playoff round. Your kids were toddlers and Jean Chretien was prime minister. Or so it seems).

In the opening round back in mid-April, Canadian teams were busy and their fans engaged. Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and Winnipeg were full of hope and promise and possibility. Unfortunately, the Senators and Canadiens, and Flames-Canucks met in the first round, systematically eliminating two Canadian teams. By the end of round two, no Canadian team was left standing.

Over the subsequent two rounds, Canadian viewers tuned out, to a large degree.

Who could blame them.

By mid-May winter was practically over (down to scattered patches of misery) and there were seeds to plant, cottages to open. Better luck next year was the hockey mantra as fans evolved from fanatical to occasional.

When they did tune in, they found the hockey as passionate as ever, but too often like a traffic jam in a phone booth. The greatest players in the game, including Patrick Kane and Steven Stamkos, fought through tight checking with their arms tied behind their backs, like Jack Nicholson in a Cuckoo’s Nest straight jacket.

Viewership was down? (Outside of the markets involved). So was scoring, perhaps not coincidentally.

In the Stanley Cup final between two excellent, high-octane teams (Tampa led the NHL with 262 goals in the regular season), four games of the six saw the winning team score two goals. TWO.

Maybe that’s why the Anaheim Ducks-Blackhawks Western Conference finale was far more compelling. The ‘Hawks and Ducks opened up play, with impunity, such that the winning team scored five goals in four of the seven games, three of which went to OT, including a double and a triple OT.

Of course, it would help if referees didn’t swallow whistles as the playoffs progress.

“Let the boys play,” remains the theme in the NHL war room. That one, and “have the players decide the outcome.”

For some reason, the game’s caretakers don’t seem to understand the players don’t get the chance to decide the outcome when their sticks and bodies are held, skills in check.

Good for the Blackhawks to play 56 minutes and 21 seconds of the Cup-deciding game without taking a penalty. But really? There was nothing to call before that meagre tripping minor to Andrew Desjardins on Anton Stralman?

The call smacked of a game-management decision to give the Lightning one last shot. Chicago had three power plays in Game 6.

So pervasive is defence in the game, power plays are often the only avenue for skilled players to be productive. Unfortunately, hockey’s prevailing wisdom is that the more important the game, the fewer the calls.

Unlike the NFL, which views pass interference as pass interference, fall and winter, hockey dictates that what is a penalty in October is a see-no-evil event in May and June.

Some have been critical of Stamkos failing to score in the final series. It might have helped his cause if his team had more than two power play opportunities in the final two games of the series.

The agony of defeat, mixed with the sheer volume of toil from a two-month playoff weighed heavily on Stamkos, raw and honest afterward.

“It almost seems like it’s for nothing,” Stamkos said. “I know it’s not, but that’s what it feels like. You know, some people didn’t make the playoffs, they’re enjoying their off-season, you’re sacrificing, playing through so many different things . . .”

Tampa’s one-week off-season is underway. Next week, the NHL goes back to work.

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